The Risen

Sunday, October 24, 2010

From The Archives: Gone Fishin'

[First posted 1/16/06]

“Oh, August! Don't you know that you are attempting to skim the surface of Reality with a very loose net, one with really big holes? A net formed by the fabric of the limited human mind that is knotted together by words that no two people can ever agree on? When others see the sign that says “Gone Fishing” that you are going to put on your door, will they ever be able to understand or agree on what you really meant, or where you even really went?”
—Timothy Gray

My new Siamese kittens, Fiona Isobel Wickerbill and McHenry Aloysius Wickerbill, are not quite 5 months old now and we continue to spend most nights negotiating sleep and play (my sleep, their play) in bed. My other Siamese cat, Oolong, who transitioned this past June at the age of 18, still spends a great deal of time with me in her astral-etheric form, which has made the grieving process vastly easier. Aunty Oolong now teaches and guides the new little ones. I called upon her last night during an especially energetic moment on the bed when F. & McH. would not behave and stay settled down. Almost immediately, they went from high-level shenanigans to quietly purrsnoring. This was a miracle. I asked Oolong how she did this. And she told me.

[Since her transition, Oolong is now able to quite literally talk to me—this is most dramatically obvious when I'm with her in the astral-etheric zone. Or perhaps more correctly, I'm finally able to understand her at her level of communication. My first experience with this kind of thing was with Bridget, another cat companion who had also transitioned at age 18, six years ago. When I'm with them and they're talking, it feels surprisingly normal and yet overwhelming in its weirdness, because I hear them speaking to me in English and in female voices—which are nothing like I might have imagined. And boy are they smart.]

Oolong shared that she had stimulated a certain part of the kittens' brains while singing a feline lullaby to calm them. I asked her to show me which part of the brain she meant. I thought she would show me theirs, but instead, she directed my attention to my own brain by somehow lightly touching it in a way still not clear to me. With my eyes closed, I was able to clairvoyantly see the result. (If you've read The Risen, you will have some understanding of what visualization and clairvoyance are, and the differences between them.) I initially felt very tired and thought, "Great, now I can get some sleep!" but then saw the inner darkness quickly give way to patches of light. The patches resolved into more solid-looking "openings" that showed light was coming from somewhere through them. A man's face then appeared, as if looking through the "hole" and at me, as if he could see me seeing him, and he smiled, and so I smiled back. I suddenly no longer felt tired, but instead rather compelled to start thinking about who this person might be and why I was seeing him. Everything then suddenly vanished, because Oolong had ceased stimulating my brain when she saw I was becoming more awake instead of sleepy. Somewhat bemused, she said that obviously it didn't work the same way with humans as it did with cats, so she stopped since she didn't know what else would happen.

She then "flickered" — my scientific term for "stepped out for an astral minute"— and then came back into focus. Ever the nosey over-achiever, Oolong had gone somewhere to research for information about what she had experienced when she had stimulated my non-kitten brain. According to her findings, although the stimulation had indeed caused my body to get sleepy, the attention of my simulate self (ego) was also stimulated and this activated a kind of "pre-dream" process that involved the sense of clairvoyance. This is very interesting because sometimes when I have insomnia I activate the sense of clairvoyance to dissociate my astral-etheric bodies , which then makes my physical body fall asleep. (I'm too lazy to get up and make some Sleepytime tea.) If I could learn how to stimulate this part of the brain in the way Oolong did, while disallowing the simulate self to react, I might be able to cause my own cat nap to happen!

The area she had stimulated seems to be someplace in occiptal lobe, an area that receives visual images. Oolong explained that the visual response was something that happened with the kittens, but in vague, misty images that first distracted, and then lulled and soothed them. Because they have no simulate self ego-mind, they quicky fall asleep. But because I have a human's simulate self ego-mind, the soothing action was interrupted by its "need to know and respond" and thus it began waking me up. This certainly sounds like the experience of "racing thoughts," when anxiety rules and the mind can't stop tumbling thoughts and worries round and round. She further explained that my amygdala had become activated by the ego mind activity. (It took me awhile to figure this word out, as she was trying to tell me in a conceptual way and did not have the human English word for it. But because the word "amygdala" is actually one I saw at some point, it was stored in my mind— although this is not a word I use much so couldn't find it myself (meaning it was on the tip of my tongue.) We finally looked at a labeled picture of the brain together which seemed to confirm it. I was also aware of Kaufmann wavering around somewhere in the background, guiding the two of us from some distance.* I read that the amygdala is believed to control emotions, (meaning they don't really know what it does). This would fit with the known behaviour of the simulate self, which uses emotions to direct and control what it believes to be the correct way to navigate life's circumstances. I won't attempt to comment further on any connections and possibilities here, since the best science can come up with is a belief about what perceived parts of the brain might do. Read or review The Risen for material about the brain and mind fields.

Well, that's it. There was really no point to all of this, other than my just wanting to share the experience, to possibly confirm the experiences of others and at the continued risk of confirming the beliefs of certain inquiring minds that there's a hole in my boat and the bait's dead.
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Update 10/24/10 -- the Wickerbills are now 5 YEARS old, and needless to say, there are nights when we still argue about when to play and when to sleep.

"Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive ' many' which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively 'many' in process of passage into conjunctive unity... Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of 'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition.-- (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 26)

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"Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
-- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

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"The instrument of thought, which has produced this world that does not work properly, is no longer valid. So perhaps this instrument of thought is worn out. Is there another instrument we can use?" -- Krishnamurti

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"...Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song, and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly."
-- Alfred North Whitehead - English mathematician & philosopher (1861-1947)___________________________________

". . . keeping the Risen concept of weaving in mind, perhaps at this point it can be sensed that what we have before us, from which we are inseparable and as reflected in this book, is a Supreme Tapestry. There appears to be a Very Grand Design which we all follow, either in awareness
or not, co-creatively or not -- recalling that creative means fun. As we weave we are free to make it up as we go along in any way we please, simultaneously staying within the Grand Design as imagined by Higher Imaginals, of whom we an inseparable part. The Grand Design is a work of perfections intermingled with imperfections, solutions with mistakes, and stillness within movement. The Higher Imaginals are many things, but for our purposes here, it suffices to say that they are very advanced and evolved individuals, or Higher Selves."
(from The Risen: Dialogues of Love, Grief & Survival Beyond Death; Chapter 13, Mundus Imaginalis, p. 165).